Constellations
Constellations
562 articles in this category.
Constellations
The Cassini spacecraft was deliberately flown into Saturn in 2017 because NASA refused to risk contaminating Enceladus, and in its final 90 seconds its thrusters fought the atmosphere so it could keep sending data home
Constellations
A Colorado startup just raised $30 million on a quiet bet that astronauts won't actually be the ones building the moon's first permanent base — robots will get there first
Constellations
The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so that whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years.
Constellations
Voyager 2 photographed Neptune in light so dim that some exposures lasted seconds or even minutes, while the spacecraft was racing past the planet. To stop the images smearing, engineers programmed the spacecraft itself to compensate for the motion, turning the whole probe into its own image-stabilisation system.
Constellations
The Huygens probe descended by parachute to the surface of Titan in 2005, through an orange haze colder than minus 170 degrees Celsius, and more than a billion kilometres from home it remains the only spacecraft humanity has ever landed anywhere in the outer solar system
Constellations
A Colorado startup just raised $30 million to send a second rover to the Moon — and the real bet isn't on exploration, it's on becoming the construction crew that arrives before the astronauts do
Constellations
The Soviet Lunokhod 1 rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, then scientists found its lost reflector in 2010 and got a signal bright enough to reopen a forgotten corner of lunar science
Constellations
JWST just mapped the morning weather on a planet 690 light-years away, and the forecast of sand-like clouds exposed a 100-fold bias in how exoplanet atmospheres have been read for more than a decade
Constellations
In 1970 a Soviet probe became the first object ever to transmit from the surface of another planet, and it lasted barely 23 minutes on Venus before the heat killed it
Constellations
Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury are lining up in the western sky after sunset this week — and a Blue Moon is sliding past Antares — in a run of evening sky events that won't be matched again for years
Constellations
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched before Google, before the smartphone era, and before digital cameras became normal, and NASA engineers have now reconfigured it to keep observing the universe on a single working gyroscope after 35 years aloft.
Constellations
The Wow! Signal lasted 72 seconds in 1977, has never been detected again, and remains the most compelling unexplained candidate in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Constellations
Voyager 1 is still transmitting from more than 24 billion kilometres away, but in 2024 NASA had to repair it by remotely moving pieces of 46-year-old code around a failed memory chip — a software patch sent into interstellar space and confirmed nearly two days later.
Constellations
When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched to Mir in May 1991, the country that sent him was still the USSR; by the time he returned in March 1992 it no longer existed, his home city of Leningrad had become Saint Petersburg, and even the spaceport that launched him — Baikonur — was now inside newly independent Kazakhstan, forcing Russia to renegotiate access to the machinery of its own space program
Constellations